8vo. 8 steel-engraved plates; folding map with hand-colored route; folding plan of Salt Lake City; half-title. Late 19th-century polished tan calf gilt, spin gilt, red morocco lettering-piece gilt, edges marbled (corners bumped, some very minor wear to extremities). Provenance: Charles W. Traylen, Castle House, Guildford, Surrey (bookseller’s label).

 

FIRST EDITION, describing Burton’s 1860 journey through Sioux territory to Salt Lake City.  Burton’s “view of America is fresh, lively, sharp, and pertinent. The City of Saints is one of his best works… a rare account by an experienced traveler who was alert to every detail, to language, to the nuances of a dynamic developing nation that showed high civilization on its eastern coast and progressive barbarism as one traveled westward… [He includes] lists of routes and way stops, the legal system and frontier justice, analysis of raw materials… it is mid-century America in five hundred pages” (Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, pp. 334-35). Penzer, pp. 68-69; Graff 512; Howes B-1033; Sabin 9497; Wagner-Camp 570.